The Elder Fire

with Ramon Castellanos...

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SPIRITUALITY
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The Elder Fire podcast combines music, sound effects, timing and rhythm to create a potent sonic medicine meant to help us reconnect to the virtues of the ancient world. Combining themes such as ancestry, animism, deep time, wildness, embodiment, eroticism, alchemy, unlocking genius, health-craft, the art of practice and surfing fate & destiny. eatingancientvirtue.substack.com

19/12/2025

The Hunt For Peak Experiences and Deep Flow State

The new Elder Fire podcast is out! This podcast has five primary chapters: * Dangerous Play * Deep Flow States, Ecstasy, and Transcendent Experiences * The Hunt for Peak Experience * Humans Are Designed for Peak Experience * Absorption Practices Listen On: Spotify YouTube Apple Music This episode of The Elder Fire Podcast is a direct reading from In Praise of the Wild Spirit: How to Rewild 21st Century Humans, exploring flow not as a ‘productivity hack’ or a ‘performance’ state, but as an ancestral necessity. Long before flow was named by psychologists, it was lived out by hunters, dancers, lovers, warriors, and ritualists who regularly entered states of deep absorption. These were not rare or exceptional moments. They were woven into daily life through danger, play, hunting, rhythm, eroticism, nature, ritual, and shared risk. It shaped us to require flow. This is a special episode of The Elder Fire that moves us through a portal into deep time, where we follow a band of hunters as they chase and track down a giant and dangerous animal that once inhabited ancient Europe. It all culminates in a “peak experience”. In Praise of the Wild Spirit is a book about rewilding the human animal within the context of 21st century life. Not as a metaphor, and not as another impotent ‘lifestyle trend’ (god we really don’t need more of those), but as a response to a deep civilizational illness: the slow domestication of our inherent wildness. At the heart of this domestication lies a quiet theft, as modern life systematically removes us from the very conditions that once made humans feel alive, aligned, and whole. We name this ‘the modern meaning crisis’, but its roots run deeper, and reflect a much broader loss of our innate ancestral life-ways. In this podcast flow is explored as ‘anti-domestication technology’. It is a a state consciousness where the thinking mind loosens its grip, the ego dissolves, and the human animal remembers how to belong to the world once again. Through dangerous play in nature, ecstatic movement, sex, chanting, ritual magic, and the hunt itself, humans once entered states of merging where self and world became one on a regular basis. This podcast is call to bring this back into our lives once again. Drawing on deep time, mythic imagination, and lived ancestral memory, The Hunt for Peak Experience tracks these states back to the pack and the hunt. We enter the world of the Deep Ancestors, where attention cuts sharp, instinct awakens, and identity softens in the presence of consequence. Here, presence becomes total. Life regains its weight, its color, and its meaning. This episode is not a call to recklessness, nor an escape from the modern world. It is a remembrance of what the Wild Spirit still knows: without peak experience and deep flow, something essential in us withers. The Elder Fire Podcast weaves voice, music, rhythm, and sound into sonic ritual. This episode serves as a living transmission from In Praise of the Wild Spirit for those who feel the pull of something older, wilder, and innate stirring beneath the static of modern life. Rewilding is not a retreat from civilization. It is the reclamation of wildness within it. Ways to Support The Podcast Purchase In Praise of The Wild Spirit Here Join Eating Ancient Virtue Here Make a One Time Donation This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

1h 2m
16/10/2025

We Are Not Machines: Remembering What It Means to Be Human

This podcast has 6 primary chapters: * Speak to Me of Weaving: From Human Hands to Mechanical Engines * Speaking The Language of The Machine People * The First Technologies * The Trans-Humanist Current & Antlered Beings * Welcome to The Machine Metaphor * Living with The Machine People While Remembering What it Means to Be Human Listen On: Spotify Apple Music YouTube It is 2025, and humanity finds itself in a ‘battle of the senses’ - between the real and the simulated, the flesh and the mechanical, and the human and the machine. The dominant forces that cater to modern culture perpetually seek to ‘dehumanize’ us. The vision of transhumanism, a movement characterized by replacing human parts with machine parts, and the sudden deluge of AI software is ‘hijacking’ our innate human capacity to ‘shapeshift’ and enter into deep resonance with ‘other’. More and more, we are moving away from sensation, nature, and presence only to enter into ‘virtual landscapes’, a domain for which we are poorly suited. If we follow this stream to its end, it leads to the actual ‘end of humanity’, in so far as we will become cyborgs. If we do not actively maintain our humanity we will be ‘the last people’. This is not outlandish or hyperbolic by any means; and there are already major players dead set on making it happen. Now, in 2025, we no longer see modern machine technology as a tool, but as something to become. It may not be something you are considering doing, but there are many people who are salivating at the thought of connecting their brains directly to the matrix. What do you think will happen in the future when two subgroups of humanity find themselves at odd ends of such a deeply polarizing issue? ‘Becoming a cyborg’ is a more extreme version of what this podcast addresses. More so, and more relevant to us all, is the subtle, daily ways in which we are displaced from our bodies and made more ‘mechanical’ in behavior, while losing ‘touch’ with what it means to be human. We can see this showing up in the machine metaphors currently used by many people, such as when someone says they received “a download”, but also in words like: Upload, Upgrade, Optimize, Re-program, Install, Bring Online, Defrag, Hack, and Rewire I’m not referring to how these terms are used in computers, but how people apply them to their own bodies and minds. Such comparisons between humans and machines might seem to make sense at first glance, but they profoundly fail to capture the true mystery of being human. This is an insidious example of how we are being conditioned to ‘speak the language of the machines’. The machine language, especially at its highest levels, like those found in computer systems and AI models, often draw us away from embodied sensation, because they do not have bodies. So in order to enter into resonance with them, we must displace ourselves from felt presence and enter into disembodied abstraction. Humans evolved in deep wilderness, surrounded by elemental forces, animals, and vegetation. We share a soft animal body, pulsating with blood, sexual fluids, and sensation with much of life on this planet. Because of this, we are designed to speak ‘the energetic language of nature’, a language our nervous systems interpret through felt sensation. To speak the language of nature is to speak a more primal, energetic language again - an innate human capacity if there ever was one. The natural world is a perpetually transforming and pulsating field of energy that could be characterized as a cacophony of signaling. The signals of nature are heat, cold, pressure, weight, waves, rhythms, expansion, condensation, eruption, discharge, seepage, collection, and dispersal, among others. All of this is felt and experienced in bodies. Maintaining our humanity in the coming age will require a variety of practices - perhaps the most powerful of which is simple presence with the whispers of the world and feeling subtle ways in which energy moves through our bodies and nature. Listen to The Elder Fire podcast to explore all of this through an epic sonic adventure. Learn to resist the machine, and remember what it means to be human. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

1h 6m
05/09/2025

The One True Calling: Making and Mixing Soul Medicine

The new Elder Fire podcast is out! This podcast has three primary chapters: 1. The Earth Is a Marketplace, but the Heavens Are Our Home 2. The Mythic Music of The Modern Marketplace 3. Authentic Authority and The Folding of Steel In this podcast we explore what it means to ‘make and mix soul medicine’ and how this is the one true calling. At another level, it’s intended to act as a ‘sonic talisman’, helping you deepen your relationship to your soul medicine and its importance in the world. Tune into The Elder Fire podcast to listen. It sounds best with high quality speakers or headphones. Or Listen on: Spotify YouTube Apple Music The concept, feeling and lived experience of ‘purpose’ has tugged at the heart and mind of humanity since time immemorial, and whether or not you realize it, it tugs at you too. Contemporary culture acknowledges a ‘meaning crisis’, but totally misses the mark on its actual cause or potential solution, for it drops the responsibility of anchoring into deeper meaning upon the ‘ego’ and the cultural narratives that infuse the modern world. Along with this, many of us feel a deep yearning to participate in the unfolding of life, and an unyielding sense that we are here to to offer our gifts, to grow as people, and be of service by providing something essential to the whole. This is what is known as calling. Yet, following this path (or the thought of doing so) leads us straight into the internal thorn bushes of fear, doubt, resistance, impostor syndrome, or the external barricades of familial expectations, cultural narratives and institutional agendas. We want a sense of meaning and purpose, to follow the call, but as citizens of the modern 21st century, don’t even know where it comes from. Pop culture ‘purpose-talk’ leads people down dead ends, because they are dead narratives to begin with. Clinical psychologists sit on couches, blame their client’s problems on their parents and run down the checklist of the supposedly ‘well adjusted’ trying to find it. If not that, then our deep sense of purpose is hijacked by what the institutions around us claim it ‘should be’, what we ‘should do’ or what it ‘should look like’. All of this outsources and leaves meaning decontextualized from the lived experience of it. When this happens, life, with all its ups and downs, its failures and success, its boons and banes, loses a sense of being infused with essential continuity of purpose; we then measure life against trophies, accolades, influencer status, money, or white picket fences instead of a living breathing sense of being aligned with something that runs on a more profound, subterranean level: the soul. Each of us is infused with an inherent meaning and purpose seeded within our souls...the reason we come to earth in the first place. Ancient cultures knew this, and knew it well. They enshrined this truth into the very fabric of their societies with songs, mythic stories, chants, rituals, ceremonies, traditions, and life-ways that perpetually anchored humans into the soul world. Today, we have lost this anchor, and as a result, the human world is in a special kind of chaos. Souls function at the level of myth, archetypes, gods, ancestors and spiritual forces. When this is understood and lived all the way out, we recognize the physical world is intersected and interacting with an unseen world that animates it with a meaning and purpose that is more akin to a force of nature, like lightning. Not only this, but our soul has divine powers that emerge for us in the form of gifts, talents, and innate capacities. Our life story carries an underlying mythic narrative that is supported by the deep archetypal identity we were pre-seeded with before we were born. The challenges of our life have perpetually forged and shaped a set of skills. All of this comes together under the banner of soul medicine: an innate power or energy bestowed upon us before birth that can act upon the world for the benefit of self and others. It is the soul, its inherent medicine and its agenda that is one of the great wellsprings of meaning and purpose that once existed within human life. 🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com *Special note: there was a hiccup with the audio recording of my voice that slightly eroded its quality. I have been told that it does not significantly interfere with the overall podcast, but I thought I would mention it. Solutions are underway to make sure it does not occur in future podcasts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

1 hr
29/07/2025

A.I. as Soul Reaper and The Death of The Modern Artist

The new Elder Fire podcast is out! This podcast has three primary chapters: * Physicians of The Soul and The Big Pharma of The Mind * The Terrible Cost of Doing What Works * Eros, Eroticism and The Source of Create Inspiration Tune into The Elder Fire podcast to listen. It sounds best with high quality speakers or headphones. Or Listen on: Spotify YouTube Apple Music A.I. has landed, and it’s here to stay. It’s powerful, fast and outstrips the biological pace of many humans when it comes to generating content. Like a mechanical creature with an endless pit where a stomach would be, it rapidly consumes enormous amounts data, and with lightning speed churns out graphics, articles, books, songs and more. The market is being flooded with these ‘generations’, all the while A.I. is being brought into core infrastructure of entrepreneurial dreams. Like the siren of some great machine, it beckons us forth with the power of its sheer utility. As humans, and especially as artists (of any kind), one of the most lucid dilemmas we face today involves whether or not to work with A.I., and if we do, in what way. The struggle is real. We see many of our peers getting on the rocket ship, and seemingly blasting off into space with their business ventures - or at-least that is what we are led to believe. We ask ourselves if we ought to as well, and some of us, for good reason, feel unsure, hesitant, and resistant. Others, see the value of A.I. and seek to take measured approach, while some salivate at the chance to hand over their work with zero discernment. Although ‘ethical’ consideration certainly matters, in this podcast we vividly explore something else that runs deeper than ethics: the power of the artist as a ‘medicine maker’, a receiver/transmitter for the soul, and a biological node for the erotic force that catalyzes divine inspiration. Of course, everyone wants to be ‘successful’ with their art, but the artist who publicly shares their work in the psychic landscape carries a great responsibility. While A.I. is ‘useful’, its utility comes with a cost, a price, a debt that must be paid. The cost might be terrible, and it might take things from us that leaves the whole vacated of the divine gifts you came to earth with, and also strips the erotic from our psyche; for the choice to work with A.I. alters the flow of imagination, possibility, dreams and the core values that drive us to create. Although A.I. can help us in certain ways, it’s critical to remember that each of us already carries the seed of genius, the divine spark, and the unique story that allows us to create works of art (in whatever medium), that A.I. can never replicate. These offerings are what can light up the world with soul. Thus the modern artist stands at juncture of two alters, each with an ability to alter the emerging path of the 21st century. The choice we face is one of two different kinds of sacrifices. On one altar lies the sheer utility, speed and accuracy of generative A.I, and the other altar houses ones divinely inspired soul level work. The dark chasm between the two, where uncertainty about your loyalties lie, holds the danger of death, the death of the modern artist. 🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com My thanks to the many amazing artists who freely offer their music on Pixabay, and a special thanks to Cití Ní Ghallchóir - also known as: Kitty Gallagher, for her Irish keening found throughout the podcast. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

58 min
23/10/2024

Star-Talk & The Re-Animating of Time

‘Sonic Adventures’ combine music, timing, rhythm and sound effects with long form essays that have been animated through the spoken word. When listened to with intent, they are potentially transformative experiences in their own right. Star Talk and Reanimating of Time Astrology is ‘time-space animism’. Studying the interplay between stars, cycles of time and myth is as old as humans, who watched, lived and slept under starry sky’s. Modern pop astrology has eroded the integrity of astrological wisdom. Beyond that, due to certain somatic tensions in the eyes, most modern peoples are disconnected from the sky. In this episode, we explore what it means to truly ‘see’ the night sky for the first time. Many city dwellers have never experienced the unfiltered brilliance of the stars, with urban lights dulling the celestial view. Modern peoples move beyond merely ‘looking’ at the stars to actually perceiving their pulsating, breathing rhythms—like a symphony of light in the sky. This is possible when we awaken perception, and connect with the ancestral wisdom of star-watchers. We touch on the roots of astrology, where ancient peoples saw the stars not just as navigational tools, but as stories of the gods and cosmic patterns. Astrology can reanimate our understanding of time, offering a glimpse into the ‘spirit’ of time that ancient cultures understood so deeply. Astrology acts as a prism, helping us connect with the rhythms of the universe and rediscover our place within the cosmos. Tune into The Elder Fire podcast to listen. 🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

26 min
10/06/2024

The Daimonic Body - The Sanctification and Vivification of the Embodied Form

This a sonic body for the essay written at eatingancientvirtue.substack.com, The Daimonic Body - The Sanctification and Vivification of the Embodied Form. A ‘sonic body’, which combines music, sound effects, timing, rhythm, and intent to create a powerful and entertaining ‘auditory adventure’. It lets you feel the essay on a more somatic and experiential level. In tonight's Stories by the Fire, we will be exploring a core pillar of the ancestral now, which is referred to as the daemonic body. It refers to an embodied state of felt and lived experience where the animal aspects of our nature, inherited through deep time, merge in a synchronistic fashion with the more primordial, eternal, and soulful forces of our nature. It explores how these two states, these two aspects of our being, can fuse together like an enchantment, like a spell, where the physical materia that holds the enchantment is sanctified and vivified by it. It also delves into how the more ephemeral aspects of this wondrous enchanting force require a more substantive root in order to transmit into the world. But the daemonic body moves beyond that, even to a place where these two dichotomies, these two distinctions between spirit and matter, dissolve and merge, re-expressing inside the embodied human form. At a deeper level, it recognizes that both of these poles are truly one. Join me at the my Substack: theancestralnow.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

39 min
01/05/2024

An Ant Colony of One: Coming Into Relationship with Individualism

In this Elder Fire podcast, we offer a ‘sonic body’, to the essay: “An Ant Colony of One: Coming Into Relationship with Individualism. A ‘sonic body’ creates a ‘sonic adventure’, connecting music, sound effects, quotes, timing and rhythm to bring the words to life in a way only the sonic element can. Join us. An overwhelming majority of the humans living within modern Western culture take the ‘individual experience’ for granted. Like a blazing ball of light and fire in the sky, the feeling that we are ‘individuals’ appears self-evident; as plain as the sun. From a certain vantage point, it is ‘true enough’ to say that your experience is the only thing that is ‘real’. Yet, of all the puzzling and profound questions that swim within the human experience, by far one of the most convoluted is ‘What is an individual?’ Although apparently conspicuous, it is in fact...not. This clear-cut notion of a distinct individual separate from all others is a relatively contemporary idea, that many older cultures did not lean into quite so strongly, because they were primarily relational in their orientation, and saw each person, nay, each ‘thing’ as a crossroad. Yet, if we live in a relational universe, is there a way to come into ‘right relationship’ with individualism? What would happen if we both reclaimed the indigenous wisdom of relationality and then proceeded to come into relationship with modern individualism...loving it dearly into service to the greater whole? 🌩️ Join me @ My Substack: theancestralnow.substack.com I want to offer thanks to the creators, who freely offer their music online, all the songs can be found below: https://pixabay.com/music/pulses-perfect-beauty-191271/ https://pixabay.com/music/main-title-tribe-of-lions-peter-bamitale-205055/ https://pixabay.com/music/main-title-field-of-war-182675/ https://pixabay.com/music/beats-stellar-echoes-202315/ https://pixabay.com/music/beats-spirit-blossom-15285/ https://pixabay.com/music/pulses-soft-coming-spring-198551/ https://pixabay.com/music/ambient-midnight-forest-184304/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

35 min

7 Episodes

The Elder Fire podcast combines music, sound effects, timing and rhythm to create a potent sonic medicine meant to help us reconnect to the virtues of the ancient world. Combining themes such as ancestry, animism, deep time, wildness, embodiment, eroticism, alchemy, unlocking genius, health-craft, the art of practice and surfing fate & destiny. eatingancientvirtue.substack.com

Creator

with Ramon Castellanos...
Years Active

2K
Episodes

7
Rating

Explicit
Copyright

© Ramon Castellanos
Show Website

The Elder Fire